


Anya

by unveiled



Series: Snippets [8]
Category: X-Men - All Media Types, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: 1960s, 1970s, Alternate Universe - Canon, Cameos by Marvel Characters, Gen, Holocaust references, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-22
Updated: 2012-08-22
Packaged: 2017-11-12 16:49:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/493518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unveiled/pseuds/unveiled
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One path in a universe of possibilities. An Anya-centric sequel of sorts to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/315832">72 Hours</a>, told in snapshots of different points in time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. your boat will go by starlight alone

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings/content notes:** This story contains period-appropriate internalised sexism as well as problematic attitudes toward race and sexuality. Also, while not referenced explicitly, it deals with the aftermath of the Holocaust.
> 
> The story title was taken from a line in [Sarah Harmer's "Lodestar"](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d82YW-OjLKY), which I listened to repeatedly as I was writing this story.
> 
> I'm afraid I selectively picked and remixed what little the comics tell us about Magda, but at some point one has to throw up one's hands and acknowledge the feebleness of one's strength against decades of accumulated, sometimes contradictory canon. If you're well-versed in the comics and the larger Marvel universe, have fun spotting the shout-outs.

Anya would've gone to Charles sooner, but Charles was preoccupied with the draft lottery; sitting tensely in his study long into the night until his voice grew hoarse under the strain of repeated telephone calls. It was 1968 all over again, when she'd become used to bringing their shared lunch to his study. They had sat in companionable silence while the radio droned on, both pretending that Charles hadn't lost enough weight to need a tailor's service.

 _Enough_ , she told herself sternly, clutching Director Carter's card, now gone soft and slightly ragged at the corners. She'd folded the memory of their meeting away, far from the surface of her mind where Charles would overhear. _You have to tell him today_.

She waited until she heard the tyres of Lilandra Neramani's car crunching over the gravel in the driveway before running up to Charles's study, projecting a hurried _may I see you, sir?_ barely two feet from his door. Charles's _yes, of course_ was a warm, curious spark in her head, and she turned the doorknob to see him clearing away the remnants of tea. One of the buttons of his shirt was missing -- it wouldn't have been obvious, she thought, if his tie wasn't also slightly askew.

Charles raised an eyebrow at her. Then grinned, unabashed, and just like that they were Uncle Charles and Anya, not the Professor and his student. She threw herself onto her favourite armchair, curling up close to the fireplace.

Humming to himself, Charles switched off the radio. "What is it?"

Silently, she slid the card across the table to him. She watched a host of emotions flickering across his face as he put two and two together, his eyes and mouth tight with something that an observer might call disapproval, but Anya knew it was closer to an instinctive, smothering protectiveness Charles was never quite able to shake off and didn't care to apologise for.

Strangely, it made her feel a little better.

"I assume they want to recruit you." At her nod, he said, "Do you intend to take up their offer?"

She met his eyes and gave a minute shake. "No. I don't know if they want me because of who I am, or who my father is."

"It's not inconceivable they might have found out, given the resources at their disposal," Charles admitted, looking far from thrilled at the prospect. "Conversely, it is equally possible they're simply interested in having an agent with a ready presence among mutant networks."

Anya wrinkled her nose. "It shouldn't be their job to police us. Mutants."

"Better SHIELD than the FBI, I suppose -- at least we have some traction with Director Carter." He contemplated her for a while. Not scanning her mind, but trying to read her face. "This isn't the only reason you're here."

"I guess-- no." She shook her head, disgusted at her own hemming and hawing. "I've been thinking for a while about my future and I want to talk to you about it."

"Ah."

"You had this talk with everyone else except me."

An embarrassed flush briefly tinged Charles's face. "Guilty as charged. I'm afraid I _have_ been putting it off. I usually have a chat with the parents where possible, you see, though you're quite a bit older than your classmates. I had hoped you would have the opportunity to consult your father--"

"Why would I want to consult _Magneto_?" she exploded angrily, fingernails scraping against brocade where her fingers clutched the armrest. "He has nothing to say that I want to hear. What advice could he possibly give _me_? How to wipe out people like me?"

"Anya," Charles said gently. "Erik loves you, regardless of everything, even ideology. Whatever he's done, he did his best to be a father to you and your siblings."

"It takes more than a few Passover meals to be a father," Anya said, trembling. Her heart was beating against her ribcage like a drum. "It doesn't matter if I'm the exception to the rule when the rule is: _kill all non-mutants_."

"Erik doesn't actually want to _kill_ all non-mutants, he wants to--"

"Uncle Charles, that doesn't make it any better."

He passed a hand over his face, weary. "No, you're right. All the same, he does care very deeply about you."

"It's not that I loathe him," Anya muttered, hating how small her voice sounded. "I don't. He's still-- he's part of who I am. But I'll never be as close to him as he is to Wanda and Pietro. I don't think I want to be, either."

The twins were young enough to look up to Erik Lehnsherr as a distant but loving father, but she'd grown up without him. She was 14 when he found her, old enough to be considered an adult and married off. She didn't even retain any memories of him before the fire and her mother's flight, which Charles said was a result of trauma. Erik still looked at her as if she was a wandering soul with an unwelcome attachment to him, or his eyes would linger on her hair and she knew he was thinking of Magda.

If she'd been a mutant, Anya thought, or if her father hadn't been one, they might still have built a good, solid relationship. Maybe. Or maybe all the might-have-beens would still have stood between them, and they still wouldn't know what to do with each other. 

One year, Erik arrived two days before Purim and stayed through Passover. They spent the first week awkwardly trying to be a father and a daughter to the other, before giving up the attempt as futile. To their probably mutual relief, they proceeded to assiduously avoid each other for the rest of the month. Erik spent more time with Charles than her, she thought, and clamped down on it, hard, because she knew what her father was doing with the man who raised her. It made her feel a little shocked, still, and a lot weird in a way that was not-good, and she didn't want Charles to know more about it than he already did.

Charles brought his wheelchair closer and took her hands in his, squeezing gently. His eyes were sad and kind, and she wished she wasn't too old for a hug, in this country and among Charles's people. Where were Aunt Bova and the Maximoffs now? She still missed them. Anya wished her mother's father was alive -- he was Jewish like _her_ father, that much she knew, and there must have been some scandal there for him to marry a Sinti woman. Or perhaps he and her namesake had simply bumped into each other in the market and fell in love, despite the odds. 

Perhaps he and Magda understood wanting to try to be everything she was in a way that wasn't how Erik did it, maybe even worked out how to say these things better than she could. She would've liked to know her grandfather's stories and her mother's stories and all the stories of the families no longer on this earth, instead of the things left unsaid in-between her father's carefully-picked tales and the news headlines.

"What do you want to do, Anya?" Charles asked, when she was no longer in danger of weeping into his sleeve.

"Anything that's not teaching or secretarial work," she said promptly, disengaging her hands from his. "I made a list of my skills and came up with several possibilities."

"Of course you did."

"Don't laugh."

"I'm not! I won't, I promise."

"I don't know if I want to go to college." At his visible alarm, she added, "Not right now."

"Possibly you will, though? In the future?" he pressed. "You're a graduating a term early, so you'll have time to think. A bachelor's degree could open doors for you. I must admit I was somewhat concerned at first, but your grades are acceptable to any number of perfectly good universities."

" _Uncle Charles_."

His blue eyes were terribly tragic, and she wanted to laugh in his face. "All right, I'll stop pushing."

"College is more of something Wanda might want for herself." They shared an unhappy look, knowing that Erik was likely to persuade Pietro to join him; and wherever Pietro went, Wanda was almost sure to go with him. Anya said, slowly, "I want to travel. I'll pay my own way -- I thought I'll start with London, then eventually Calais and from there, I'll work my way to Transia and find my foster parents."

"I see." Charles's eyes flicked towards the globe on his desk. "I've always wanted to travel the world, myself. I thought I had time -- after my PhD, after we stopped Shaw, when the school stopped tripping into an emergency every other day. It never did happen."

 _And now you sit at the center of the web, spinning away_. Anya knew Charles heard the thought, but he was well-versed now in the art of acknowledging only what was verbalised -- at least on normal days, when he hadn't just been attacked by any number of their enemies or the other person wasn't too obtuse for even Charles's famous patience.

"Are you absolutely certain about this?" Charles asked.

"Yes. Uncle Charles, you know I won't be an innocent abroad," she said, raising her chin. "Please, don't tell my father. I'm 19 and I don't need his permission."

"Anya, I can't _not_ tell him."

"I'll write a letter for him," she bargained. "I'm leaving in spring, so if I see him before, I'll tell him in person. And I'll write to you as often as I'm able."

Charles smiled at her, a little wistful, a little heart-broken, and perhaps this was what it felt like to have a parent who was an anchor instead of an absence. He's not that old, Anya thought with a jolt -- perhaps not even old enough to actually be able to have fathered her -- but Charles had always been the teacher and substitute parent a homesick child desperately wanted.

 _Just in case_ , he said in her head, unspooling numbers and names and faces from his thoughts. She gave a wordless assent, and the knowledge was there, ready for recall: Charles's contacts and friends, scattered around the world.

"I'll miss you," he said.

"Me too," she said, because some things are too important to be unsaid, even to a telepath. Anya rose to her feet, paused, then leaned down to kiss him on the cheek. "See you at dinner."

In her room, Anya took out the list she made. She added a few more items in her neat, bold hand. Surely there must be a place in the world for a girl seeking her fortune; one who could speak six languages, knew a few secrets to bear-taming, played the violin, and had Logan to teach her as many dirty tricks as she could learn in hand-to-hand fighting. 

Even if there wasn't, it was 1969 and she had the rest of her life to live. If Valentina Tereshkova could go to space and Golda Meir could become prime minister of Israel, she could make room for herself.


	2. 5 Things That Never Happened to Anya Eisenhardt, née Lehnsherr, In the Years 1970-1974

**5 Things That Never Happened to Anya Eisenhardt, née Lehnsherr, In the Years 1970-1974:**  
  


  1. She watched [Brazil defeat Italy](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_3nRplehGk) in the World Cup final of 1970, screaming her lungs off with thousands of others as the ball rocketed from Carlos Alberto's foot and immortalised his team in history. Never before had she felt so connected to a heaving mass of breathing, shouting, crying strangers; united in a moment of sublime beauty. Human, mutant -- what did it matter? On that sunny day in Mexico City, they had witnessed perfection.
  

  2. The jobs listed on her official resume included: musician, fruit picker, (worst) journalist (ever), au pair ("bodyguard, actually," she once said to one of her lovers), tea seller, radio operator. Her unofficial resume was longer, and could only be compiled with the cooperation of several intelligence agencies across the globe. Anya was briefly a mercenary, which ended the morning she buried her partner-in-arms after he proved to have fewer scruples than she could bear. Things could've become very sticky indeed, but though Silver Sable International had very few ethical standards, it did hold on to them very firmly. Eventually, with some difficulty, Mme Sablinova was persuaded as to the correctness of Anya's judgment. Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters received four refugees and Anya retired to Aunt Bova's home in the Wundagore highlands until her cracked ribs healed. Then she promptly got into trouble again, but quite understandably there were organisations keen on hiring someone who knew how to resist mind control.
  

  3. Anya had a third bank account before she had a permanent address that wasn't Westchester. She was comparatively well-off, if not exactly wealthy, after her stint as a soldier of fortune slash bounty hunter. She prepared a will that named Armando as the executor of her estate -- not Charles, but only because he was one of the beneficiaries, on the strict condition that he was not to name a garden bench on the school grounds after her. It was a long-running joke between them, aired out for a last bout of nostalgia, though it was one that no longer suited the woman she became.
  

  4. She read incessantly, even obsessively, in a way that would have gratified her teachers and ended their fretting had they been blessed with precognition. The turning point came after she overheard a customer at a cafe she was working in pour scorn over  _Le manifeste des 343_ , which led to her picking up the magazine it was published in on a whim. The rest of the magazine she dismissed, the manifesto she kept. It was entirely possible she purchased a flat in Marseille (the first home she ever owned, albeit under an assumed name) in 1974 so she would have a place to store her books, journals, theological papers, newspaper clippings, and a secret collection hidden within lead-lined walls.
  

  5. Anya met her father once during her five years of travel, and her siblings twice: the first after they joined the Brotherhood, the second immediately after they left it. She and the twins maintained an occasional correspondence: coded postcards, a quick "I'm not dead, just lying low" through Emma Frost and Cerebro as their conduit, and early on, a package containing a compilation of all the information Anya managed to track down about their mother's family. On impulse, she addressed a copy to her father. She received his stilted, polite note of thanks in Zagreb, but lost it while running for her life. The feeling of vague regret was as familiar to her as the sight of her father's back, his helmet tucked into the crook of his arm, walking out the door.



  
( _And one more for the road:_  
  
1977, San Francisco, New Year's Eve. Anya had never been so drunk in her life -- and on  _champagne_ , the shame of it. She was betraying Charles's parenting in a terrible fashion, she thought, as well as the months she spent imbibing moonshine and cod soup while hiding out in a fishing village off the coast of nowhere. Running with the wrong crowd wasn't always about the glamour of mimeographed pamphlets and AK-47s.  
  
Jean-Paul was laughing at her, that Canadian asshole. Why had she taken it on faith that Isabel would have nice friends? She had a good mind to scare off the lovely boy with compound eyes Jean-Paul was slowly reeling in. Yes. As soon as she found more champagne, or possibly scotch, for old time's sakes.  
  
The bar was packed with revellers in various stages of inebriation and courtship. It took a while to get the bartender's attention, even for a striking woman dressed like an anarchist flapper. Her elbow struck a blonde in a USAF t-shirt, jolting a curse out of the unfortunate woman. She turned to apologise, drink held carefully aloft.  
  
That was when the floor caught fire.  
  
The first Molotov cocktail only cracked the glass front of the bar, but the second shattered the glass to douse the room and people alike with gasoline-fueled fire. One brave soul took off his velvet cape to use as a makeshift fire blanket, even as a tiny woman ran towards the flames with a bucket of sand. Another Molotov cocktail followed, and another, punctuated by screams.  
  
Beyond the thick, choking smoke, Anya saw the outline of three men, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, poised to bolt -- and one of them was raising his arm, something indistinct in his hand. She cursed.  
  
"Jean-Paul, get these people to safety," Anya snarled, vaulting past the fire to confront them.  
  
She hadn't even noticed the blonde following after her, until a well-aimed punch crunched satisfyingly into the face of a hitherto unseen fourth man. He went down like a sack of bricks, and was immediately jumped upon by the former-revellers-turned-mob.  _I must be well and truly shit-faced_ , Anya thought blurrily, watching a drag queen in a marvelous Donna Summer get-up kick the devil out of one of their assailants. The blonde in the USAF t-shirt had one of the men pinned against a streetlamp with her forearm, teeth bared, not stopping even after the ominous wails of police sirens surrounded them.  
  
As it turned out, the back of a police car was a wonderful place for introductions.  
  
"Carol Danvers," said the blonde, cracking her knuckles and rattling the handcuffs around her wrists. The name was frustratingly familiar, tickling a vague memory at the back of Anya's mind. "You were pretty good out there."  
  
"You should meet my sister." She grinned, opening her left fist to show Carol the keys she lifted from a very,  _very_  careless police officer. "I'm Anya. Pleased to make your acquaintance.")


	3. Fathers and Daughters

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For stickmarionette. Originally posted [here](http://thoughtsnotunveiled.tumblr.com/post/16779507862/set-in-the-same-universe-as-72-hours-and-your-boat).

The nurse had made brisk work of bathing Charles and his routine check-up. She was probably experienced enough to sense that Anya didn't want her to linger — Anya had checked, the nurse didn't have psi abilities — and kept her comments brief and matter-of-fact. No change. Pulse and heartbeat normal. Breathing normal. Unusual brain activity, as per the last examination. The nurse was too professional to say anything, but Anya could see the shape of the words in her eyes: _nothing makes sense_.

Anya had picked out Charles's clothes and she dressed him herself: a shirt in the shade of blue that brought out his eyes, black slacks pressed to sharp creases, a pair of socks that matched the shoes she placed under his bed. That had been a battle, to be allowed by the doctors to dress Charles in his usual clothes instead of a hospital gown, especially after she fought hard for him to remain in the school. But Charles would be distressed if he woke up and found himself virtually _naked_ , stripped of his armour. He'd spent enough time in clothes designed for ease of access by hands he couldn't truly have said no to, after Cuba and the endless hours of surgeries and physical therapy.

Anya rolled up the sleeve on Charles's right arm, where the IV line was attached. The nurse helped her set everything up, then left. They compromised, in the end. She bought new clothes for Charles to wear, clothes he wouldn't miss if the medical staff had to cut through them. Anya made sure the clothes were comfortable and of good quality, nevertheless, the cotton of the shirt soft under her hands.

She was terrible at this, she thought. If she was a better caretaker she would've allowed the doctors to do what they thought were best for Charles, instead of thinking about it in terms of what Charles would've wanted. Aunt Bova had made her drink bone and tripe soup and applied foul concoctions to her ribs, deaf to Anya's protests, while she waited for her body and spirit to heal. She briefly entertained the possibility of spiriting off Charles to the Wundagore highlands. If science didn't work, maybe, _maybe_  — there was still magic. Even if Charles didn't believe.

She watched his sleeping face for a long time, holding his hand in hers, while the clock ticked wearily into the night.

When she heard the creak of the window hinges and felt the cold draft around her ankles, the only thing that surprised her was that she'd been expecting _him_ to wrestle with his paranoia for days yet, reading and re-reading her message as the paper disintegrated into his hand. A surge of anger boiled over in her stomach, sour and ugly.

She turned in her chair. "Close the window," she said, knowing she sounded waspish and not giving a damn. "Sarah wanders around at night sometimes — no one needs to know you're here yet."

The window swung shut with a gesture of a gloved hand, but even before the latch clicked into place, Magneto was striding towards Charles's bed. He'd taken off his helmet. She studied him carefully, shifting to the dispassionate wariness that had become second nature with her father around, noting the ease with which he carried himself in Charles's bedroom. Space reformed itself around him, making the room Charles's and _his_ , as if the estrangement between them happened only last month. As if the detritus of his presence still lingered in forgotten clothes hanging in the wardrobe and a towel in the bathroom. There were none. She knew.

She stood, offering Magneto the chair — some acts of courtesy were drilled too deep in her upbringing to be ignored. He sat, feline and self-possessed, sweeping his cape around himself. She refrained from rolling her eyes, barely.

"What happened?" he said, staring down at Charles. Magneto looked anguished, stricken with worry.

Anya wondered, sometimes, if Magneto knew that he now carried the helmet on his head always — that his face was forever moulded by its shadows, even when the helmet was tucked away in Charles's study and Magneto played at being Erik Lehnsherr, lighting candles with his children. But that was years ago. She didn't think he had much cause recently to take off his helmet, with Pietro and even Wanda long past any hope of amicable reconciliation with their father. She herself had given up on it a long time ago, though it still rankled that she didn't know whether it was her or Magneto that gave up first.

"The Shadow King," she said. Magneto flinched, his mouth drawing tight. "You know him, then. Good. I don't have to explain what he can do."

"Is that what you want my help with?" Magneto frowned at her over his steepled fingers, though his gaze slid back to Charles almost immediately. "There's no need for this charade. I will find him and—"

"No," she snapped. "The family takes care of its own. We have strength enough to find the Shadow King and deal with him without the Brotherhood's help. I asked you to come for other reasons. The first being that Charles would want you to know, and if he— dies, for Mystique to be informed by someone she trusts."

Anya blew out a breath, trying to compose herself. "I'm sure you remember that Charles has trained some of the students to use their powers to defend themselves against an attacking force — and, if necessary, strike back. If this had happened three years ago, we would've been ready.

"But we're in a period of transition: most of the first group are scattered around the world. It'll take time to recall them and get them mission-ready. The second group, our current students, are too young and inexperienced. The combat instructors — Logan, Alex — are ready to go, but we can't leave the school undefended. The other teachers have had self-defense training and were drilled in contingency plans. They can hold out against, say, a Brotherhood team, but we can't be sure that the Shadow King won't have other tricks up his sleeve."

She watched Magneto taking it all in, a storm gathering under the blank look that was him trying to rein in his disappointment and anger. She'd seen it a number of times since he found her and her siblings, mostly directed at Charles. And her.

"We tracked down associates of Shadow King: Andrea and Andreas von Strucker. From there, we found a few generals in the army, a politician or two, even a few well-placed individuals in the police. Some of them are mutants. We don't know yet how extensive his influence is. He has to know that Charles is the closest thing this school has to a very large and very powerful guard dog, so we have to assume he's planning something big. We know he's holed up in a compound up north, with an unknown number of persons.

"It's been four days since Charles fought him," she said quietly. "As far as we can tell, they're still fighting. Charles's consciousness is no longer in his body. The astral plane — ridiculous name, but that's where they are. We don't know if destroying the Shadow King's physical body will help, but we're giving it a damn good try. Someone has to stay behind and protect the school, though. And in the absence of the combat instructors, someone needs to continue the training. Given the circumstances, it seems prudent for that someone to be experienced in large-scale combat strategies."

Magneto sat up, no longer the mourning lover. "You want me to be a _teacher_?"

"Yeah. Well, Charles does, to be precise." Oh, that flabbergasted look on his face was incredibly satisfying. "Congratulations. In my capacity as an agent of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, I am offering you a position as a temporary instructor. Amelia will sign off on your contract in the morning as Acting Headmistress. Don't look so shocked — Charles left detailed instructions in the event that he's incapacitated by a hostile force. Clearly, he thinks you're up for the job."

"And you?" His gaze on her was steady, not giving anything away. "What do you think?"

"I think that Charles has been wrong before," she said. "I think I still can't tell whether I'm looking at this as your _human_  daughter and all that entails, instead of as Anya Eisenhardt, the woman who went to war to learn to stand on her own.

"I'm willing to concede you may not be an utter disaster." She smirked at him. "Also, Charles's footnotes on his little screed were very persuasive."


	4. Sisters

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for Galentine's Day 2012 and originally posted [here](http://thoughtsnotunveiled.tumblr.com/post/17577117925/set-in-the-72-hours-universe-sometime-vaguely-in).

"Can't you just change the probability of our success?"

Wanda rubs the heels of her palms against her forehead. The wind whips her hair around her face, making Anya's hands itch to comb it away. "My power doesn't work that way."

"How do you know it doesn't? You haven't always had the hex blasts either," Anya says, reasonably. Somewhere at the back of their minds, Jean is stifling a giggle.

Her sister glares at her from the corner of her eyes. It says: _I love you, but stop embarrassing me before I hex the ground beneath your feet_. It's the same look Wanda levels at Anya when she's causing a scene in public (in Wanda's words, for which Anya blames their father and Charles in equal measures), and the day Wanda invites Carol over for a family dinner for the first time.

 _Timecheck?_ , Wanda says to Jean instead. They eye the nest of buildings beyond the electric fence. Somewhere behind those walls, Sarah's probably unleashing seven different kinds of plagues upon her captors. And then there are other mutants in there, too. Anya wonders if it's going to be as bad as the rescue operation back when-- well, best not to think of that now.

 _ETA 2 minutes_. There's a pause. _Storm's moving in to disable the east perimeter ahead of Petra's team. 1 minute._

 _Roger_ , Anya says. She hefts her assault rifle. The weight of it feels comfortable and familiar in her hands, slotting into her body like a whispered hello. "Right, then. Let the big guns deal with the part where things explode, and we'll do what we do best."

Wanda tilts a smile Anya's way. "Break into a heavily-guarded secret military facility?"

"No," Anya says, silent and sure-footed as she inches forward, motioning for her sister to follow her in. "Saving each other."


End file.
